Office Depot (ODP, $3.27) beats Q4 earnings expectations, shares jump +9%

Office Depot shares climbed +9% Wednesday, after the company reported better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings.

The office supply retailing company reported adjusted earnings of 9 cents a share, exceeding analysts' expectations of 8 cents.

Revenue for the quarter came in at  $2.67 billion, higher than $2.58 billion of the year-ago quarter. However, comparable same-store sales (for stores open at least a year) fell -5%. On the other hand, revenue from the firm’s services business surged +34%, with the growth largely driven by the divisional output of CompuCom (the IT firm that Office Depot acquired in 2017).

For the full-year 2018, Office Depot sales of $11 billion were +8% higher than 2017’s $10.24 billion. Net income of $99 million, however, was lower compared to the preceding year’s $146 million.

For the full year 2019, the company expects to generate sales of about $11.1 billion.

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Sergey Savastiouk|Expert

Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.